A New World, Right in Front of Your Face

In 2011, Palmer Luckey, an eighteen-year-old technician at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, built a set of virtual-reality goggles in his parents’ garage. A lifelong enthusiast of virtual reality—wholly immersive computer-simulated environments—he had stockpiled the well-ordered workshop with commercial and industrial headsets from the recent past. (The term “virtual reality” was likely coined by Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of the technology who was profiled in the magazine in 2011.) Although not a programmer or engineer by schooling, Luckey had spent the last eleven months as an employee working on I.C.T.’s Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy program, in which veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder were guided by therapists while wearing heavy goggles that simulated the terror of combat (using a modified version of the battle game “Full Spectrum Warrior”). The program, dubbed “Virtual Iraq”—exposure therapy, but with pixel bullets—has been in use for several years, and deployed to several dozen Veterans Affairs facilities around the country.

But the hardware for “Virtual Iraq” costs as much as fifteen hundred dollars per unit. (And high-end V.R. rigs can cost tens of thousands of dollars.) Worse, it is clunky: the helmets’ small viewports give the wearer the impression of looking through a pair of binoculars at a distant scene. Luckey realized that many manufacturers had been myopically focussed on their own hardware, and that they’d missed something surprisingly well-suited for immersive experiences: cheap smartphones, complete with high-resolution displays and motion sensors.

Luckey’s garage creation, which soon was named the “Oculus Rift,” is not far from a smartphone with a headband. An L.C.D. screen spans across a plastic mask, sitting about an inch away from a user’s eyes; a barrier divides the display in two, effectively creating one screen for each eye. Motion sensors track the position of the wearer’s head, then feed this data across an umbilical cord to a computer, typically a gaming P.C. Instead of rendering one 3-D world to a single monitor, as in a typical first-person video game, such as Call of Duty, the computer renders the same 3-D world twice, from slightly different angles. It sends those two perspectives, side by side, to the Rift, creating the illusion of depth. Motion is controlled by the direction in which the wearer is looking; instead of using a mouse or a controller to direct your gaze in the 3-D world, a person simply needs to turn his head.

The Oculus Rift uses optical tricks to create the realistic sensation, like slightly warping the edges of the view in the computer, which is corrected by plastic lenses in the goggles. The pixels are more tightly packed directly in front of the eye, giving the perspective a roundness that feels more like human vision. It works. The Oculus Rift rivals—and will possibly exceed, when it hits the shelves sometime in late 2013 or mid-2014—the best virtual-reality hardware available, military-grade or otherwise.

Last year, Luckey and Oculus (the “Rift” is the model name of the first set of goggles) launched a Kickstarter campaign for development kits, pre-selling them for $300 a piece. They aimed to raise $250,000; they brought in $2,437,429. The price of the consumer version of the Rift has not been announced, but Oculus says that its goal is to “deliver the highest quality virtual reality experience at a price that everyone can afford.”

I’ve been testing the Oculus Rift for a month, and in it, virtual reality feels a lot like scuba diving. First, there is the mask. Then there is the strange disconnect between where your body actually is and where your mind, confused by the mask, is telling you that your body is located. This sensation of discombobulation is doubled in virtual reality, since the current version of the Oculus Rift doesn’t track your body or hands, only your head.

Still, more than any of its antecedents, the Oculus Rift is convincingly engrossing. Most of the several dozen people who have tried my Rift put the goggles on as skeptics, but removed them as believers that virtual reality, as a practical phenomenon, now exists.

While many major video-game producers have publicly announced future support for the platform, for now, about a dozen games—better called “experiences,” as many require little interaction besides simply showing up and looking around—are available. Most are trifles: there is a guillotine simulator with paper-cutout French revolutionaries in diorama; a virtual-reality toilet experience; and something called a “hog cranker.” But two applications stand out.

Titans of Space puts you inside a space capsule. The simulation begins with you in orbit around a 12.7-meter-wide earth. Glancing down lets you see the capsule’s control console, with simulated graphics offering trivia about the earth and moon. Look down further and you’ll see gloved hands folded placidly in your lap. (Since the Rift is only tracking your head, not your arms, it feels as if you’ve inhabited the body of a quadriplegic astronaut.) With each click of a mouse—which might be a slight struggle to find on your real desk, since you can no longer see the real world—your capsule wends on a predetermined course through the solar system, stopping over each planet and notable moon in turn. A synthesized, ersatz Hans Zimmer score builds as you swing past the gas giants, then dies down near the minor planetoids of Pluto and Eris; it erupts again as new stars swell from a pinpoint to their properly scaled size, dwarfing the sun. By the time you find yourself cocking your head all the way back so that you can take in the coronal margins of VY Canis Majoris, a dying red giant, you’ll start to have a good understanding of how otherworldly virtual reality can be.

Another application, VR Cinema 3D, by a Korean developer named Joo Hyung Ahn, sounds almost comically redundant: it’s a virtual-reality movie theatre. It’s not just a 3-D movie in your goggles, but a fully rendered theatre, complete with empty seats and tastefully illuminated aisles. Just like real life, you face forward to watch the movie. If you turn around in your seat and look up, you’ll see a familiar coruscating cone: the movie projector.

It sounds boring, but it’s not. Even though you may literally be staring at a tiny image on an L.C.D. panel an inch from your eyes, the ability to look around fools the brain into thinking that you are watching a larger-than-life projection, just like at your local fifteen-dollar-a-head cineplex. It’s easy to imagine watching a movie in a virtual theatre with friends—or at least avatars of real friends looking through their own virtual–reality goggles anywhere in the world—while blocking out the drone of a jet engine and the sight of cramped fellow passengers on a cross-country flight.

If you don’t mind the other passengers staring at you, that is. The Oculus Rift isn’t small; the development version is about the size of an iPad mini, and it is strapped to your face. It is relatively light, though—I regularly wear it for thirty-minute stretches with no discomfort—and commercial versions will almost certainly be smaller. Still, while you might feel you’re in another world, you’ll look like you’re having a nightmare in a sleep mask.

These are still early days for this new generation of virtual reality. Current hardware limitations are already being addressed: Oculus has already revealed a higher-definition version of the Rift that minimizes a “screen-door effect” caused by the ability to see spaces between the L.C.D. panel’s pixels; improved gaze tracking will make movement in 3-D space feel more immersive. Other niggles, like the need for powerful desktop machines, will be remedied by improvements in the speed of computer chips. Cameras could easily be added to provide a portal back into the real world from the virtual.

The social bugbears may be with us for longer, though, as we figure out cues and protocols: Will people be O.K. with wearing virtual-reality goggles in public? Even in private, the experience can be disorienting. I’ve already learned to touch a person in the throes of V.R. lightly on the shoulder to get his or her attention. Many have expressed skepticism about wearing Google’s Glass display. And it’s not V.R., or even augmented reality—in which computer graphics are directly overlaid on the real world—but simply a handy screen that is barely a bangle compared to the Oculus mask.

Despite the warnings of thirty years of dystopian cyberpunk, virtual reality won’t obviate current technologies. It will be another medium for us to interact with each other and with information, an additional tool to find a restaurant on a map and figure out what sort of pirozhki they serve—or what pirozhki is. What’s novel is that virtual reality provides a profound new sense of place. If screens have been windows into generated worlds, virtual reality lets us poke our heads inside and have a look around.